Notes:
This week as well as continuing with your breathing exercises you will be introduced to some of the postures commonly used in qigong and you will also begin to practice some opening and closing exercises for your qigong practice and some energy awareness exercises.BREATHING
The breath is considered so important to energy that the Chinese character for ‘qi’ (energy) is often translated simply as breath, so it is well worth putting in the time and practice to improve your skill with this. The exercises in the first two weeks of this course will help you to deepen and strengthen your breathing. Never breathe more slowly or deeply than you are comfortable with, rather go to a level that you can manage easily and then gradually slow and deepen your breath as you continue to practice. Later in the course when you learn the twelve exercises for the meridians and organs the speed you do them at will be largely determined by your breath capacity. The deeper you can breathe, the more slowly you will be able to do them and more benefit you will gain.
If you are interested in learning more about your breathing and developing greater skill with it, the Release the Power of Your Breath course goes into much greater depth in this area.POSTURE EXERCISES
The time allowed for the posture exercises during your sessions this week is five minutes each session. This is not a long time, traditionally teachers would often have their students practice various posture for times ranging up to several hours at a time, but still a beginning student will likely find it challenging.
The best thing to do is practice going into the posture and stay there for as long as you comfortably can. When it becomes uncomfortable, stand up to give yourself a rest, give your body a shake to loosen it off and then go back into the posture and hold it again for as long as you can. Repeat this until the five minutes are up.
This type of training will make it easier for you to have good posture during your qigong practice sessions. There are also many other benefits. The Between Heaven and Earth course goes into these types of exercises in much greater depth if this is an area you would like to explore further.